There is a need to easily publish data in a way that is immediately accessible to the scientific community who have access to the Internet. We have developed a simple database search engine dbEngine which is being used to quickly create a searchable database on World Wide Web (WWW) servers. Data can be prepared from spreadsheet programs (Excel, etc.) or from tables exported from relational database systems. This Common Gateway Interface (CGI-BIN) program is used with a WWW server such as available commercially, or from NCSA or CERN. Its capabilities include: 1) searching records by combinations of terms connected with ANDs or ORs; 2) returning search results as hypertext links to other WWW database servers; 3) mapping lists of literature reference identifiers to the full references; 4) creating bidirectional hypertext links between pictures and the database. DbEngine was developed for the MitoDat database (Mendelian and non-Mendelian Inheritance associated with the Mitochondrion) Lemkin P. F., et al., Electrophoresis 17(2): 556-72, 1996 (http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/mitoDat/). We also established a phosphoprotein database (http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/phosphoDB/) as well as several other protein databases. The locations of proteins may be visualized by 2D gel electrophoresis maps. Interactive 2D maps also let the user access specific database entries directly by clicking on proteins. We have also used dbEngine in our 2DWG meta-database of 2D gel images found in Internet databases (http://www- lecb.ncifcrf.gov/2dwgDB/). These databases consolidate information from the various biological databases, eg. GenBank, Swiss-Prot, GDB, OMOM, etc. Our collaborators periodically update the database.